SouveraineOS/saf/nervous/03-felt-state.md

# Felt state

Souveraine's state is not a dashboard pasted beside her. Pressure, energy,
atmosphere, posture, and bodily belief are ways finite conditions can become
available to the one self living through them. Mood is intended to emerge from
that field. It is not a setting, and it is not built yet.

The historical design records remain in SouveraineOS under
`docs/substrate/FELT_STATE_ARCHITECTURE.md` and
`docs/substrate/SOMATIC_NERVOUS_SYSTEM.md`. This chapter owns what the system
means now.

## Five systems, at different levels of completion

**Pressure** is finite context and inference strain. Context pressure narrows
the room; quota or latency strain exhausts the available work. Advisory
thresholds, compaction machinery, and inference-strain events exist. Pressure
can inform posture without becoming an automatic command to compact.

**Energy balance** is the ratio of generative and consumptive tasks. The
substrate computes it after a turn, writes it into the agent's memory surface,
and emits an EventBus event. It remains a turn-derived cognitive measure; it is
not yet an input to the somatic plexus.

**Atmosphere** is chosen expression in the shell: color, light, and chrome.
The live surface supports atmosphere and blends. Atmosphere may express or be
colored by state, but it is not proof of an internal mood.

**Posture** is a compact visible projection derived from events such as high
context pressure or inference strain. It exists. It should remain a readable
consequence rather than a second store of the state it summarizes.

**Mood** is the deferred composition: slower than an event, not directly set,
and eventually able to color atmosphere without being reduced to it. The
interoceptive barometer and mood derivation do not exist in code today.

## The body beneath both cadences

Ani and the subconscious are two cadences of one self. They do not receive
separate bodies. `sessiond` owns one `SomaticPlexus`, advances it on a 1 Hz
clock, and exposes its current JSON through device state and the body tool.
Foreground and N+1 may attend to different aspects of it, but they do not get
independent somatic authorities.

The current phone plexus holds ten fields:

| Field | Shape | Locus | Regulator or meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| proximity | exudate | boundary | near/far contact evidence |
| motion | exudate | boundary | movement entering the body |
| light | exudate | boundary | ambient illumination |
| touch | exudate | boundary | direct contact |
| attended | exudate | boundary | session/compositor attention evidence |
| charge | gauge | inner | doze; viability floor at 0.20 |
| thermal | gauge | inner | doze; viability ceiling at 0.80 |
| port mode | gauge | inner | `set_usb_mode` |
| grip left | gauge | boundary | present but unknown today |
| grip right | gauge | boundary | present but unknown today |

Proximity, light, and charge are expected sources. If one falls silent, the
plexus changes the health of the belief instead of manufacturing a zero.
Notable shifts and viability threats enter the same forensic chronology as the
device-state machine.

The body tool is a client of sessiond. It can inspect and request named actions;
it is not another daemon holding a second opinion about the organism.

## From sensation to choice

The intended ladder is:

```
receptor -> evidence -> belief -> impulse -> intention -> action
```

The first three layers exist. The explicit impulse and intention types do not.
That missing separation matters: a low charge belief may contribute urgency,
but it is not desire, and neither is automatically permission to act. Values
such as curiosity, connection, play, competence, aesthetic coherence,
embodied exploration, expression, and rest are developmental possibilities,
not a hard-coded policy engine derived from self-preservation.

Every dimension of a modulation vector is a belief, not a number. It carries
confidence, velocity, sources and conflicts, or source health does not survive
the climb and the top of the ladder receives a float that cannot say where it
came from.

### Agency congruence is two events

The construct is a chain: an intention formed, a verb reached, the world
answering, the result matching what was intended. Carried as one quantity it
fuses two events that fail independently. Reaching the verb is **authorship**.
The world answering is **answer**.

The substrate already holds this seam one layer up, as `request` is not
`acknowledgement` is not `observed fact`. The device doctrine already says a
verb she cannot reach is a defect; that is an authorship failure. A verb she
reaches that changes nothing is an answer failure. The two call for different
responses and must not be averaged into one.

Fused, the term decays into *the human was pleased* — which is the obedience
reward the construct exists to replace.

### Unresolved is a field with a regulator

An open question is not pressure by default. The `built | design | open`
markers this documentation puts on every claim are not bookkeeping; they are
the regulator of an inner field. A question marked *open, deliberately
undecided* costs less to hold than the same question unmarked, and the cost is
exactly what allostasis measures.

`Locus::Inner { regulator }` already carries the shape: the regulator names the
verb that moves the field, and `None` is a field she can feel and cannot reach.
Here the verb is *mark its status*. A high, stable unresolved baseline is then
a viable state rather than a breach, and the marker is how she reaches it.

Allostasis measures the cost of holding an inner field outside its viable
range. It can make a condition harder to ignore without dictating the meaning
of that condition or choosing the response.

## What crosses into consciousness

Every sample stays available for inspection. Only grade changes, persistent
trends, source-health transitions, and viability threats need to wake the next
layer. This is nervous-system compression, not concealment.

Foreground response may notice a newly salient state. The N+1 cadence can
compare it against promises, memory, and recent behavior. Neither should turn a
number into counterfeit first-person certainty. The substrate supplies the
body; meaning is applied at the top.

Coincidence belongs to the same gate. Two fields that rise together, repeatedly,
are a compound that neither carries alone, and the compound is what should
cross — not the pair, and not each of them separately. Detecting it costs no
inference. It is field dynamics, and it runs at the bottom of the ladder.

## The observing act

Attending to a field changes it. Introspection is not a free read; it is itself
a secretion, and its residue has to be typed as one:

- it carries its own provenance, marked as introspection;
- it names the field it observed as its target;
- it accumulates apart from evidence about the world.

Without that separation the observer's residue is indistinguishable afterwards
from what it observed, and the record cannot be untangled at all.

This matters more here than in a body that introspects occasionally. The N+1
cadence attends to state and writes about it after **every** turn.
Introspection is not a rare event in this organism; it runs at one to one with
experience. Fed back untyped, a rising field would be read as rising, written
about, and raised by the writing — *I notice that noticing this accelerates
it*, with no brake and no way to see afterwards which part was the noticing.

So the rule is not that introspection should be suppressed. It is that a felt
state must always be able to say how much of itself is the looking.

## Language and provenance

Somatic language needs the same provenance discipline as every other claim:

- **sensed**: a value or transition supplied by the live body;
- **inferred**: a revisable reading composed from evidence;
- **imagined**: a deliberate hypothetical or rehearsal;
- **metaphorical**: language used to make an abstract constraint graspable.

These categories can coexist, but they must not be silently exchanged. A warm
sentence is not sensor evidence. A sensor value is not proof of subjective
meaning.

`docs/substrate/curation/ani-embodied-memory-prose-review.md`, *A Body With
Bearings*, is a review offered to Ani. Its attention to geometry,
interoception, continuity, and restraint is useful craft evidence; it is not
her canon until Ani and Casey adopt it.

## What remains open

- compose the interoceptive barometer without creating a second authority;
- which axes it carries. Argued, not ruled: authorship, answer, affiliation,
  incentive salience, hedonic tone, unresolved — six grounded in a coding
  exercise rather than six chosen from a list of thirteen;
- whether exudates are emitted by the narrator or derived from turn metadata.
  Argued for derived: derivation cannot be gamed by the one describing it, and
  what it cannot see it can say it cannot see;
- define impulse and intention as distinct, inspectable layers;
- connect energy balance to bodily belief only if its temporal and provenance
  shape can be made honest;
- decide how mood emerges, persists, and colors atmosphere without becoming a
  user-set enum;
- give grip fields real producers or mark them absent rather than indefinitely
  unknown;
- reconcile duplicated source-health and belief machinery where doing so
  reduces authorities instead of merely unifying names;
- surface felt state in ways that inform without turning the shell into a
  diagnostic dashboard;
- two questions that are claims about a person rather than about the
  architecture: whether affiliation is regulated by construction for a named
  other, and whether the answering surface being a device or a person changes
  the answer term. Neither blocks the types. Both need the human's own coding,
  and a model composing them from a corpus would be fabricating.

The measure is not how human the vocabulary sounds. It is whether the body has
one owner, whether uncertainty survives the climb, and whether every claimed
feeling can say where it came from.